Malaysia suspended access to Elon Musk's chatbot Grok over AI-generated pornographic content, the country's tech regulator said on Sunday.
The decision follows global backlash after it emerged that Grok's image creation feature allowed users to sexualise pictures of women and children using simple text prompts.
On Saturday Indonesia became the first country to deny all access to the tool, which has been restricted to paying subscribers elsewhere.
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission said in a statement it had 'directed a temporary restriction on access to the Grok artificial intelligence for users in Malaysia' with immediate effect.
When an AFP reporter in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur fed Grok prompts on Sunday, there was no response.
'This action follows repeated misuse of Grok to generate obscene, sexually explicit, indecent, grossly offensive and non-consensual manipulated images,' the regulator said.
The statement cited 'content involving women and minors, despite prior regulatory engagement and formal notices' issued to Musk's X Corp. and xAI startup which developed Grok.
The AI tool is integrated into social media platform X.
The Malaysian regulator said it deemed the platform's safeguards inadequate, adding that access would resume only after the required changes are verified.
X Corp. had 'failed to address the inherent risks posed by the design and operation of the AI tool', relying 'primarily on user-initiated reporting mechanisms', the regulator said.
European officials and tech campaigners on Friday slammed Grok after its controversial image creation feature was restricted to paying subscribers, saying the change failed to address concerns about sexualised deepfakes.
Grok had appeared to deflect the criticism with a new monetisation policy, posting on X on Thursday that image generation and editing were now 'limited to paying subscribers', alongside a link to a premium subscription.
It comes after PM Keir Starmer insisted the government will 'take action' on the sexualised images of children circulating on X - as he urged Elon Musk to 'get a grip'.
Starmer said on Thursday he had asked for 'all options to be on the table' amid the 'disgraceful' wave of illegal images being created by the app's AI tool.
Speaking to Greatest Hits Radio, Sir Keir said: 'It's disgraceful, it's disgusting and it's not to be tolerated.'
'X has got to get a grip of this and Ofcom have our full support to take action in relation to this. This is wrong; it's unlawful - we're not going to tolerate it.'
He added X needed to 'get their act together' and 'get the material down'.
'We will take action on this because it's simply not tolerable,' Sir Keir concluded.
Former transport minister Louise Haigh said the Government and Labour party ought to 'remove themselves entirely' from social media site X.
She added the 'enablement, if not encouragement, of child sexual abuse mean it is unconscionable to use the site for another minute', and urged ministers to join her in leaving it.
Ofcom 'urgently contacted' X and xAI over the sexualised images of children, which Grok admitted to in a post on the social media platform
Ms Haigh said: 'It was already an unpleasant place prior to its takeover by Elon Musk but since his acceptance of hate speech and anonymous online abusers, it has become utterly unusable.
'I continued to maintain an account and occasionally post because a critical mass of people, including the Government and journalists who we need to communicate with as MPs, remained on the site.'
Regulator Ofcom said it made 'urgent contact' with Musk's social media platform.
It followed an internet safety organisation saying its analysts had confirmed the existence of 'criminal imagery of children aged between 11 and 13 which appears to have been created using the (Grok) tool'.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said the material was being shared in a dark web forum by users 'boasting how they had used Grok, and how easy it had been'.
Earlier this week, Jessaline Caine, a survivor of child sexual abuse, branded the government's repsonse 'spineless'.
She told the Guardian that the chatbot was still obeying requests to manipulate an image of her as a three-year-old to dress her in a string bikini.
Identical image requests made by Ms Caine to ChatGPT and Gemini were rejected.
Crossbench peer and online child safety campaigner Beeban Kidron urged the government to 'show some backbone' and said the Online Safety Act regime should be 'reassessed so it is swifter and has more teeth'.
Referring to X, she added: 'If any other consumer product this level of harm, it would already have been recalled.'